Careers in a Complex World: The Search for New Perspectives from the “New Science”

The papers that comprise this Special Issue represent a variety of attempts at exploring the potential contributions to careers scholarship that might emerge from applying concepts and models from the so-called “new sciences, ” a term widely used to denote a large area of enquiry in the physical and complexity sciences. This article introduces the special issue. It explains its origins, and defines the territory that it covers, specifically, the kinds of career on which the articles focus, the meaning of the term “new science, ” and the kind of connections that we believe can be made between the two. Finally, we briefly introduce each of the papers in the Special Issue.

[1]  J. Alexander,et al.  Images of Organization , 1988 .

[2]  Stuart A. Kauffman,et al.  The origins of order , 1993 .

[3]  R. Kanter.  The new managerial work. , 1989, Harvard business review.

[4]  James Gleick.  Complexities of Feynman. (Book Reviews: Genius. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.) , 1992 .

[5]  R. Goffee,et al.  Career Frontiers: New Conceptions of Working Lives , 2000 .

[6]  S. Kauffman.  At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity , 1995 .

[7]  Michael B. Arthur,et al.  Handbook of career theory: NEW IDEAS FOR THE STUDY OF CAREERS , 1989 .

[8]  Stephen R. Barley,et al.  Careers, identities, and institutions: the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology , 1989 .

[9]  G. Mead,et al.  The philosophy of the act , 1938 .

[10]  P. Bak,et al.  Self-organized criticality , 1991 .

[11]  E. C. Hughes,et al.  Institutional Office and the Person , 1937, American Journal of Sociology.

[12]  A. Koestler.  The Act of Creation , 1964 .

[13]  D. Hall.  Protean Careers of the 21st Century , 1996 .

[14]  E. Lorenz.  Deterministic nonperiodic flow , 1963 .

[15]  D. Parker,et al.  Chaos, Management and Economics: The Implications of Non-Linear Thinking , 1994 .

[16]  Michael C. White,et al.  The Evolution of Organizations: Suggestions from Complexity Theory About the Interplay Between Natural Selection and Adaptation , 1997 .

[17]  K. Lewin.  Field theory in social science , 1951 .

[18]  Hugh Gunz,et al.  Careers and Corporate Cultures: Managerial Mobility in Large Corporations , 1990 .

[19]  S. McGregor,et al.  Leadership and the New Science , 2004 .